Dr. Okamoto, or the Sorrows of Addiction
Content warning: This essay contains descriptions of animal testing that some readers may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.
“Don’t tell anyone about these experiments. People will get angry.”
In the fall of 1973, Dr. Michiko Okamoto was an associate professor of pharmacology at Cornell University Medical College where my friend Jasper Chin and I were lab volunteers. Jasper and I went to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
Stuyvesant was and remains one of the most competitive public high schools in the U.S. There’s a scary entrance exam to get in (if I took the test now, I’d surely fail), and the school has been famous - or notorious - for its rigorous, stressful curriculum since it opened its doors in 1904. Half the students wanted to become doctors so, lacking any insight about what I might do with my life otherwise, I figured I had to go to medical school. The surest route to medical school was through a name-brand college like Princeton, Harvard, etc. As a less-than-stellar student, I knew I had to fluff up my college application portfolio in any way I could to get into that name-brand college. A stint as a lab worker at a medical school might be just the ticket. Jasper was less career-driven than I, but he agreed to go along with me to get a job.
I must have gotten the phone number of the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology, Dr. Walter Riker, from another student who had worked at Cornell. In those ancient pre-email days, you contacted people on the phone or with a letter: I called Dr. Riker and he agreed to meet with us after school. Dr. Riker sent us along to Dr. Okamoto. Thus, in the fall of 1973, began our strange relationship with Dr. Okamoto, only the second Japanese person I’d met. (For the first Japanese person I met, see the first installment of My Japan Journey, “Encounter with a Hitchhiker,” July 3, 2023).
The corridors of the medical school through which Jasper and I found our way to Dr. Okamoto’s office were redolent of solvents, antiseptics, and floor wax. Dr. Okamoto was in her 40s and she wore a white lab coat. In fact, I never saw her wearing anything other than a white lab coat. Her English was a bit stilted, and she kept using the word “concern” in a highly idiosyncratic way:
“You come to talk about work in my lab concern?” or “What is your objective concern?”
Only many years later did I realize that Dr. Okamoto’s use of “concern” was an artifact of Japanese, and that in her mind, she was translating her thoughts from Japanese to English. “Concern” was what she apparently used to express ni tsuite (について), which is often used as a tag to identify what the speaker is talking about, as in rabo no baito ni tsuite (ラボのバイトについて), “about part-time work in the lab”. It took Dr. Okamoto a lot of time to explain things. Jasper and I would watch the afternoon sky darken into dusk from the window of her office, and still she went on. She had a philosophical bent:
“You must look at the forest concern, not only the trees.” She spent a lot of time trying to clarify our objectives. Jasper and I just wanted to go home, do our homework (of which there was much), and ultimately get into med school. In retrospect, I see that Dr. Okamoto was extremely generous with her time, spending hours with a couple of clueless high school kids, trying to inculcate values of hard work, focus, and diligence.
Then there was the matter of Dr. Okamoto’s experiments. She was in the midst of a years-long study of addiction to and the consequences of withdrawal from barbiturates like phenobarbital. She used cats as her test subjects. The cats were supplied from animal shelters and laboratory animal dealers. A graduate student would anesthetize each cat, implant a tube in the animal’s stomach, and proceed to administer doses of barbiturates so high that the animal could only tolerate the chemical through a gastric tube. It would take little time for the cat to become addicted.
At some point, the supply of barbiturate would be abruptly cut off sending the animal careening into acute withdrawal. Their cage floors were equipped with detectors which converted the vibrations of drug withdrawal-induced seizures into electrical signals which were transmitted to data loggers. The intense, wildly-swinging zigzags on the recording tape indicated clonic phase seizures, the violent jerking and twitching associated with epilepsy. Then there were was the eerily straight line indicating the terrifying stiffening of the limbs of the tonic phase seizures. The investigations revealed that barbiturate withdrawal is terrible and not infrequently ends in death.
Dr. Okamoto did not want word of her experiments getting out into the public domain: she feared the antivivisectionists, now known as the animal rights movement.
For the most part, Dr. Okamoto assigned Jasper and me the kinds of tedious tasks typical of scientific research. We would hand-copy columns of numbers, adding them up using bulky early calculators. We would wash laboratory glassware or the clean the lab. Eventually, by the end of the school year and the beginning of the summer vacation, Dr. Okamoto came up with an experiment we could conduct on our own as we worked in her lab more or less full time. We would use lab mice for drug tests of our own.
We were given a supply of pure white lab mice and taught how to handle them. The mice were too small for us to implant a gastric tube. Instead, we learned how to use an intragastric applicator: a syringe fitted with a cannula having a tiny ball on the end. Hold the mouse by the scruff of the neck to open its mouth and gently thread the tube down its throat and into the stomach. We would dose the mice with barbiturates (were a couple of clueless high school boys really entrusted with a supply of highly-addictive drugs?). We would get them addicted and then withdraw the drug. We learned how to find the lethal dose (the mouse would die), how to adjust for the animal’s body weight, how to titrate down to a dose that was merely tolerable and addictive, etc. Sometimes we would dose the mice on a Friday, leave the lab for the weekend, and return on Monday to find several dead and decomposing mice in their cages.
The work was making me miserable. I don’t think Jasper liked it much either and I think that at some point he bailed out of the lab altogether. I felt bad for the mice, which were small and adorable with their little red eyes and wiggly noses. I began apologizing to them as I gingerly (and not always successfully) threaded the gastric tube into the terrified mice. Dreadful.
I’m not sure what Jasper took away from the experience of working in Dr. Okamoto’s lab, but I came to the realization that Science was probably not going to be part of my journey. Certainly not pharmacology and animal testing. I lost touch with Jasper after we graduated in June 1975.
But I did find Dr. Okamoto herself intriguing. The phone would sometimes ring when we were in her office: this was probably the first time I heard spoken Japanese. (Maybe I’d heard the stylized, guttural Japanese common in samurai movies.) I remember her saying repeatedly Hai, hai, as in “I’m listening…” She had a school-age son at home, and perhaps these calls were from him. Dr. Okamoto was quiet, a very hard worker, and obviously brilliant. As a Japanese woman of her generation, it is likely that she found in America the success that would have eluded her in patriarchal Japan. I think there was something about her Japanese-ness that led me not to biomedical research, but rather to Japan itself.
I only learned much later that the research Dr. Okamoto was doing, work that involved the sacrifice of many animals, has been of great benefit to medicine. Her research helped establish invaluable thresholds and guidelines for physicians’ use of barbiturates to control their patients’ pain without getting them addicted.
Ultimately, Dr. Okamoto had every reason to be worried about opposition to her research by animal rights activists. In November 1988, The New York Times reported:
“After a long campaign of protest by animal-rights advocates, a professor at Cornell Medical College has given up a $600,000 Federal grant and left unfinished a 14-year project that used cats to study barbiturate addiction.
“The professor, Dr. Michiko Okamoto, whose work is cited in standard pharmacology textbooks, returned the three-year grant to the National Institute on Drug Abuse in September after she and Cornell were the targets of demonstrations, petition drives and thousands of letters condemning the experiments.
“Scientists at the institute said that….it was the first time in memory that a NIDA grant had been returned after a project had already been financed.”
It us unclear if Dr. Okamoto bowed to external pressure, to pressure from the medical school itself, or if she simply had pangs of conscience that led to her to abandon animal testing. She remains a seminal figure in the study of anesthesia and barbiturate addiction.
I worked through much of the summer of 1974 in Dr. Okamoto’s lab. I had a nice addition to my college application, but my tenure at Cornell Medical School did not get me into my dream school, Princeton. I settled instead for Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, which at the time did not even offer Japanese language classes. To begin learning Japanese, I had to go to Middlebury College’s summer language institute in 1978.
And to the lost spirits of the little mice who fell victim to the deadly syringe I wielded some 50 years ago, gomen nasai (ごめんなさい). I’m sorry.
